Social Media Management Platforms – A new arsenal for Digital Marketers

With the advent of social media, the battle to win customers has been taken to a completely new turf. Long gone are the days when marketing teams had to design campaigns based on large, inaccurate databases, hitting various demographics with no conclusive end results to show who, when and how they had been hit. These campaigns would spam inboxes that were not relevant and frustrate the email user. The marketers are now equipped with better guns, ‘Social media management platforms’, push over the old wheelie cannons of Spam mail, the Sniper team is here to stay!

Equipped with precise data, social listening, monitoring capabilities, the Social Media Management (SMM) platforms are the new age arsenal for marketing and sales teams. With their 9A0-090 @s and #s, SMM platforms hit the target and hit it hard. These platforms provide conclusive results of who, when and how they had been hit. The web 2.0 has totally changed the landscape for enterprise marketing and sales teams. The marketers use personalized social campaigns and messages, they hit the prospect turn them over to Sales for nurturing and conversion, then they attach themselves to the customer socially, helping generate positive sentiments, get feedback and build a brand. The enterprises are becoming ‘Social’ instead of just being socially available.

During my research for a SMM platform for an organization, I tweeted “I need a social media management platform”. That was it, I just had to tweet these few characters and I found myself in a deluge of tweets and retweets, #’s and mentions. Numerous software in various TB0-114 forms and shapes tried to elude me with demos, free trials, Facebook kept throwing advertisements, Google suggested me Blogs, YouTube had Video suggestions, some said “Me too” , some were flashy, some subtly explained their dominance due to legacy branding and I swear one of them followed me everywhere on the Internet like a haunted soul!

Finally after going through tons of sales pitches, referral documents, presentations, demos and videos of almost half a century software, I enlist the top features that we need in a SMM platform:

Social Listening- The platform should be capable of listening to recent trends in an industry, brand mentions and customer voices across various networks. It should provide smart data and filter prospects for better targeting.

Managing all the social activity from a single interface- Social publishing, editing, calendars, scheduling, promoting and engaging with an audience all done from a single platform.

Build and maintain relationships – The relationships are key to building any business. Track key influencers on Social network and engage with them to drive more audience. Contact existing clients and generate feedback to track the market sentiments for the brand.

Measure the ROI on social media marketing- Customized report generation and analytics for the social media activity helps in calculating ROI. Reports and analysis provide direction to better content generation and engagement.

Mobile friendly Interface- The platform should be scalable and adaptable with mobile devices interfaces. It’s not social until it’s mobile.

Integration – The platform should integrate with other marketing efforts such as content creation and tapping into sales team support software such as Salesforce for improving targeting and conversions.

I came across Adobe Social. This is just amazing. The product delivers a seamless experience by integrating fully across other marketing and sales software in an enterprise. It leverages its capabilities to collect smart data from across the social networks which help in engaging and influencing audience in a way which was never done before by marketing teams.

What is Adobe Social?

It’s one of the five standalone modules that comprise “The Adobe Marketing Cloud”. It utilizes the existing Adobe content creation and analytics tools to enable social publishing, engagement, listening, measurement and reporting to provide a complete SMM platform.

Who should use adobe social?

Enterprises in retail, e-commerce, entertainment, travel, hospitality and media are the most suitable benefactors from using Adobe Social. Master Card, Honda Europe, Disney, Sony PlayStation are a few examples of customers that use it for their Social media marketing.

Which social networks it supports?

Facebook, Google+, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and many more. Adobe recently announced integration for Flickr, FourSquare, and Instagram. Foursquare integration provides it an edge as it now boasts of having precise geolocation data. The check-ins at various venues by users can provide insights in local marketing initiatives.

What are the key features?

Social publishing is empowered with powerful content creation tools like Photoshop. The software has an inbuilt application generator for better engagement on social media using apps for contests, promotions, sweepstakes etc.

Provides analytics of social posts by tagging them to SiteCatalyst analytics.

Built in governance and permissions hierarchy to operate efficiently in a team.

Sentiment analysis and Content analysis on a scale of 1-10, positive negative or neutral

Advanced reporting and measurement against KPIs by industry is available.

Pricing based on umber of social profiles

24×7 availability of support staff and training is included in the annual contract package.

There are other several products in a market that offer similar features and maybe more but as Clint Eastwood puts it “A man has got to know his limitations”.